Category: process

Lack of Onsite Customer

This is a serious problem. Your project exists to serve somebody, and your success is directly proportional to understanding what they want, so that you can build it. You need as much communication bandwidth between the programmers and those people as possible.
Continue reading “Extreme Programming Experiences: Part 3 of 5: Lack of Onsite Customer”

“Lazy YAGNI”

You Aren’t Gonna Need It can lead to some silly situations if you interpret it too pessimistically. The pessimistic (and wrong) interpretation is that you should pretend that the user story you’re implementing is the only one you know about. This equates to doing zero up-front design, because you’re only concerned with whether the design satisfies the user story you’re currently implementing. The price of making this mistake is design churn: each new requirement may incur a large rewrite of existing code. This is obviously not a recipe for productivity.
Continue reading “Extreme Programming Experiences: Part 2 of 5: “Lazy YAGNI””

Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

This does not mean “do the least work possible”. Doing the least possible is not XP, it is hackery, which is the methodology that leads to a Big Ball of Mud.
Continue reading “Extreme Programming Experiences: Part 1 of 5: Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”